Mixed Blessings, at the Elder Gallery of Contemporary Art, is an expansive solo exhibition presenting paintings, sculptures, and installations, draws from the shuffling, cross-cultural entanglements that comprise multi-disciplinary artist MyLoan Dinh’s experiences with faith and identity. Born in Vietnam, Dinh escaped her war-torn country as a child with her family, moving between refugee camps, resettling as a sponsored family by a Lutheran Church in the Appalachian Mountains, and ultimately finding her home in Charlotte, North Carolina. The formation of Dinh’s spiritual identity is conspicuously composite—she was raised in a traditional Southeast Asian Buddhist household and educated in public schools in the predominantly Christian South. These geographic, social, cultural, and religious influences have significantly shaped her life perspective and creative pursuits. In this new body of work, Dinh offers a contemplative navigation through the complex, interwoven layers of her spiritual and cultural identity, in view of historical and contemporary narratives, and shares not only the intricate histories woven in her personal story, but also the labyrinthine structures of human identity more broadly. Her work constructs spaces within which the ever-changing, always unfinished meanings of identity can be explored, subverted, and reimagined.
The exhibition is ongoing through June 18th, 2022.
For more information on the gallery and exhibition related programing please visit www.eldergalleryclt.com.
